No one will be able to sleep when the launch window opens, however.
Wiseman: About seven seconds prior to liftoff, the four main engines light, and they come up to full power. And then the solids light, and that’s when you’re going. What's crazy to me is that it's six and a half seconds into flight before the solids clear the top of the tower. Five million pounds of machinery going straight uphill. Six and a half seconds to clear the tower. As a human, I can’t wait to feel that force.
A little more than two minutes into flight, the powerful side-mounted boosters will separate. They will have done the vast majority of lifting to that point, with the rocket already reaching a velocity of 3,100 mph (5,000 kph) and an altitude of 30 miles (48 km), well on its way to space. As payload specialists, Koch and Hansen will largely be along for the ride. Wiseman, the commander, and Glover, the pilot, will be tracking the launch, although the rocket's flight will be fully automated unless something goes wrong.
Wiseman: Victor and I, we have a lot of work. We have a lot of systems to monitor. Hopefully, everything goes great, and if it doesn’t, we’re very well-trained on what to do next.
After 8 minutes and 3 seconds, the rocket's core stage will shut down, and the upper stage and Orion spacecraft will separate about 10 seconds later. They will be in space, with about 40 minutes to prepare for their next major maneuver.
In orbit
Koch: The wildest thing in this mission is that literally, right after main-engine cutoff, the first thing Jeremy and I do is get up and start working. I don't know of a single other mission, certainly not in my memory, where that has been the case in terms of physical movement in the vehicle, setting things up.
Koch, Wiseman, and Glover have all flown to space before, either on a SpaceX Dragon or Russian Soyuz vehicle, and spent several months on the International Space Station. So they know how their bodies will react to weightlessness. Nearly half of all astronauts experience "space adaptation syndrome" during their first flight to orbit, and there is really no way to predict who it will afflict beforehand. This is a real concern for Hansen, a first-time flier, who is expected to hop out of his seat and start working.
Credit: NASA Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen is a first-time flier on Artemis II. Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen is a first-time flier on Artemis II. Credit: NASA
Hansen: I'm definitely worried about that, just from a space motion sickness point of view. So I'll just be really intentional. I won't move my head around a lot. Obviously, I'm gonna have to get up and move. And I'll just be very intentional in those first few hours while I'm moving around. And the other thing that I'll do—it's very different from Space Station—is I just have everything memorized, so I don't have to read the procedure on those first few things. So I'm not constantly going down to the [tablet] and reading, and then up. And I'll just try to minimize what I do.
Koch and Hansen will set up and test essential life support systems on the spacecraft because if the bathroom does not work, they're not going to the Moon.
Hansen: We kind of split the vehicle by side. So Christina is on the side of the toilet. She's taking care of all that stuff. I'm on the side of the water dispenser, which is something they want to know: Can we dispense water? It's not a very complicated system. We just got to get up, get the stuff out of storage, hook it up. I'll have some camera equipment that I'll pull out of there. I've got the masks we use if we have a fire and we're trying to purge the smoke. I've got to get those set up and make sure they're good to go. So it's just little jobs, little odds and ends.
Unlike a conventional rocket mission, Artemis II vehicle's upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, will not fire right away. Rather, after separating from the core stage, Orion will be in an elliptical orbit that will take it out to an apogee of 1,200 nautical miles, nearly five times higher than the International Space Station. There, the crew will be further from Earth than anyone since the Apollo program.